Asus X99-a Nvme Support

[Perpetuo Carlson]

Ihave built a new computer out of some used and some new parts. It is a Xeon E5-2683v3 (Haswell-E, 14 Cores, 2.0GHz) on an Asus X99E-WS Board with Quad Channel 4x8GB Crucial Ballistix Sports RAM. I got a brand-new WD Blue SN550 1TB drive for this configuration and put it into the NVMe Slot (supports PCIe only and the drive is PCIe).

It seems that I need to wait for a little more than a minute before pressing the reset button, otherwise I will end up in the UEFI Setup again, and with the next reboot finally can boot. If I wait for one minute after the first attempt before resetting, it works fine.

i have the SN500 nvme drive 2x. and on my B550 steel legend asrock i have in 1 slot the same problems. sometimes it works fine at start, sometimes its not showing up. and sometimes my pc is half frozen. mouse pointer is usaable, but cant start programs, cant restart pc and have to hard reset the pc. Have now updated my bios, so lets hope it helps. if not i think i ask for RMA and will change to samsung.

Asus x99 motherboard (rampage v) and have the same problems.

Even installing Win 10 on this drive was a pain, got different message errors, until read a tip somewhere that said to disconnect all other drives, and it worked like a charm.

Think I am having the same issue with a new laptop, I added a SN550 as storage on a dell xps 17 and a few weeks in, the thing will crash and then that drive disappears completely. If I remove and reinsert the drive it will work again for half a day or so. Is there a way to RMA them?

I had this problem with same SN550 on 2 different X99 boards (ASrock Extreme 4 3.1 and Asus Rampage V). I logged a support ticket with WD a few weeks back (still open), but since then noticed a firmware update came through on the WD dashboard app. Since applying the new firmware to the drive I have not had a reoccurance of the issue after around a week. Considering the problem was daily, it seems promising the update may have resolved the issue.

So do you know if the Linux kernel 4 from Debian:

-image-amd64

works for your NVMe device?

We use that kernel so if it does, then it should have been already supported.

If not, what's the error messages? Device not found by Clonezilla but actually it exists on the system? Is the device name is like: /dev/nvme0n1? Or?

Sorry, I do not have any NVMe devices so I can not test it.

Thanks.

"md126" "6001GB_Unknown_model_md_uuid"?

It looks like it's in software RAID mode. Could you please run the command in Clonezilla live command line prompt:

1. sudo -i

2. cat /proc/partitions

Then post the results of (2)?

I apologize-- I think I was mistaken. I have a two-drive 6TB raid 0 array on the intel controller. Both 3TB drives are showing separately and, in previous versions of Clonezilla, the array itself did not show. This device must be the array. Long story short: it looks like the Intel 750 SSD is not being detected at all.

If you have any other commands or anything else to debug please get back to me on this. I would like to do as much as I feasibly can to enable NVME on clonezilla as a whole both through the server (drbl) and the live.

@zer0ops,

Oh, this is about disk to disk cloning. My initial focus was on disk image.

Thanks for reporting this. Is that possible you can boot Clonezilla live on that machine, and let me remotely login via ssh? If so, please email me at [steven at stevenshiau org].

Thanks.

I was able to test the Clonezilla live 2.4.2-13 on a usb stick and was able to save and restore images to and from intel based nvme drives, however the restore function threw some errors that didn't seem to affect the restore process but might need debugging on their own.

Just used the current Clonezilla 2.4.5-28 on an ASUS X99-A chipset to clone Windows 10 from a SATA SSD to a Samsung 950 Pro M.2 NVMe and it worked flawlessly! Windows booted right up from the cloned drive.

Anyway, I have the drive installed on a PC with nvme slot and Magician 5.2 is telling me it is not supported. Anyone else got the 970EVO to work with their Magician software? I need Magician to enable edrive capability for bitlocker hardware encryption (unless Samsung had a CLI tool for doing this?).

If your bios is set to "raid on" then you must change it to "AHCI" in order to install latest version of samsung firmware and get samsung magician to recognize your drive. If you just change the values in your bios, you will get blue screen of death; you need to do it this way:

I want to use a G2 Z-Turbo drive with 512GB NVMe as my boot disk in my first generation Z620. I purchased a single slot, 512GB Z-Turbo G2 drive off of Ebay. This drive included the original, HP branded Samsung SM961 NVMe drive. Per the installation instructions I installed this in slot 3. The jumper configuration is set for a single card (i.e. figure 1 in the Z-Turbo drive installation guide).

Since I want to use this as the boot drive I removed all other drives, booted Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, and installed the operating system. No issues were observed with the installation. Upon reboot the system is unable to boot from the drive. Searching online I came across this thread:

I followed the instructions in the first post about enabling UEFI support for the storage devices and restarted. Still not boot. I decided to reinstall the OS just in case this change required as much. Same result.

I have tried everything I've read on the HP forums and I am still unable to get this device to boot. Is it possible to use a Z-Turbo Drive G2 (with its corresponding HP branded NVMe SSD) to boot a first generation Z620. I am running BIOS version J61 v03.96 which I believe supports NVMe booting (which, from the forums, appears was added in 03.84).

1. this workstation line lacks the required "nvme" boot code in it's bios, and HP will not release a updated bios to fix this as these workstations were end of life BEFORE nvme booting was approved by intel and HP

2A. the HP Z Turbo/Z Turbo "G2" PCI-E cards are exactly the same, only the installed SSD was different the G2 card had a nvme sm951(MZHVxxxxxxxx) installed and the non G card had a SM951 AHCI SSD (MZHPxxxxxxx) or the precursor AHCI XP941

Also note that the sm951 is a OEM non retail drive that was used by HP and Lenovo, however the firmware differs between them,.... both will work in the HP systems but the lenovo firmware has not been designed/tested for HP and vice versa

the Seagate Warpdrive, Intel 750 and 3600 (including the OEM P3605) series, and the apple ssd's using the SSUBX/SSUAX based controller and the correct apple custom M.2 style socket to pci-e adapter, OCZ RevoDrive 3 of these only the warpdrive and the intel 750/3x00 ssd's are quick by today's standards the others are slower

That statement is incorrect. HP made the NVMe-controller M.2 stick ZTD G2 for the ZX40 generation of workstations, not the ZX20 generation. The ZTD G1 was made for your Z620, and there was a BIOS upgrade for that family of workstations which allowed it to work. There are a lot of posts in this forum about the G1 versus G2 issue... use the search bar and also google to find those. For all practical purposes the ZTD G2 (made for specific NVMe-controller M.2 HP sticks) will not work on your workstation. There are a few workarounds mentioned in the posts but IMHO they are not practical. The physical HP ZTD PCIe card that currently holds your NVMe M.2 stick itself will work fine in your Z620 if you can find an appropriate AHCI-controller M.2 HP stick made for this purpose...so not all is lost.

Those particular HP G1 M.2 sticks are hard to find but I have built up several Z620s combining a ZTD G2 PCIe card with a 512GB HP ZTD G1 M.2 stick, and those work fine together. The 265GB HP ZTD G1 M.2 sticks are also available with less searching. These are not cheap for what you get because they are now rare. These made-by-Samsung G1 M.2 sticks have specific HP firmware applied... the G2 PCIe card is nice because it includes a heatsink that fits over both the G1 and G2 sticks. My terminology: a ZTD G1 or G2 PCIe card without a M.2 stick is called a ZTD card and with a stick it is called a drive.

DGroves has posted in the past that the ZTD G1 used two different M.2 sticks, the most common of which is the XP941 with an AHCI type controller. The later much less common one (the SM951 with a AHCI controller) is significantly faster. There also is a SM951 version with a NVMe controller (even faster) so you have to be careful what you're looking at.

EDIT: The model alphanumerics are different for the two SM951 types... H means AHCI and V means NVMe when you look in the right spots. Look at the third alphanumeric in the upper "Part" number and you can also look for H vs V just beyond the hyphen in the "Model" number. Examples below, using non-HP sticks... I did not have a bunch of the HP version pictures at the time, but I personally only use the HP ones because I know they work (given that they use unique HP firmware versions). The method works the same HP vs non-HP:

3a8082e126